1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services. More particularly, the present invention relates to capabilities that enhance substantially the value and usefulness of various messaging paradigms including, inter alia, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS), Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), etc.
2. Background of the Invention
As the ‘wireless revolution’ continues to march forward the importance to a Mobile Subscriber (MS)—for example a user of a Wireless Device (WD) such as a mobile telephone, a BlackBerry, etc. that is serviced by a Wireless Carrier (WC)—of their WD grows substantially.
One consequence of the growing importance of WDs is the resulting ubiquitous nature of WDs—i.e., MSs carry them at almost all times and use them for an ever-increasing range of activities. For example, MSs employ their WDs to, possibly inter alia:
1) Exchange messages with another MS (e.g., “Let's meet for dinner at 6”) through Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, messaging.
2) Secure information (such as, for example, weather updates, travel alerts, news updates, sports scores, etc.), participate in voting initiatives (such as, for example, with the television show American Idol®), etc. through various of the available Application-to-Peer, or A2P, based service offerings.
3) Engage in Mobile Commerce (which, broadly speaking, encompasses the buying and selling of merchant-supplied products, goods, and services through WDs).
The WD uses that were described above have, among other things, driven a steady annual increase, year over year, in the number of (SMS, MMS, etc.) messages that have been exchanged by and between WDs. That steady increase shows no sign of abating. For example, as reported by the industry group CTIA (see ctia.org on the World Wide Web [WWW]) in the U.S. there were over 158 billion SMS messages sent during 2006 (representing a 95% increase over 2005) and there were over 2.7 billion MMS messages sent during 2006 (representing a 100% increase over 2005).
As the messaging ecosystem has matured, and among other things messaging has been used for different purposes (e.g., P2P, A2P, etc.) and the volume of messaging has increased, different message addressing schemes or paradigms have arisen. For example, in the past the addressing of a message may have been fairly straightforward and may have included just a conventional Telephone Number (TN). More recently the addressing of a message may have included a Short Code (SC). For reasons of improved MS user experience, increased performance, etc. today and in the future the addressing of a message needs to include, and all of the different entities that process messages (e.g., WCs, intermediaries, enterprises, Content Providers (CPs), Service Providers (SPs), etc.) need to support, further (i.e., enhanced, flexible, extensible, etc.) message addressing capabilities.
The present invention provides an infrastructure that supports such further (i.e., enhanced, flexible, extensible, etc.) message addressing capabilities through among other things the availability of Dynamic Tags (DynaTags, which as described in detail below [1] are variable length sequences of various numeric, alphabetic, special, etc. characters that reside within a private namespace [i.e., a namespace that is private to a MS] that is offered by, and hosted or resident within, for example a SP [2] that may be managed [e.g., created, edited, deleted, organized, etc.] by a MS within their own private namespace and [3] that may be associated by a MS to one or more destination addresses [such as for example a TN, a SC, an E-Mail address, an Instant Messaging [IM] handle or address, a Session Initiation Protocol [SIP] address, etc.] and [4] that may be employed by a MS as the address of a [SMS, MMS, etc.] message) and addresses various of the not insubstantial challenges that are associated with same.